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Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
270•theblazehen•2d ago•90 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
32•AlexeyBrin•1h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
13•onurkanbkrc•1h ago•1 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
709•klaussilveira•16h ago•211 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
976•xnx•21h ago•559 comments

Software Engineering Is Back

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
5•alainrk•51m ago•2 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
87•jesperordrup•6h ago•34 comments

Omarchy First Impressions

https://brianlovin.com/writing/omarchy-first-impressions-CEEstJk
5•tosh•1h ago•5 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
136•matheusalmeida•2d ago•35 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
70•videotopia•4d ago•10 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
15•matt_d•3d ago•4 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
241•isitcontent•16h ago•26 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
45•helloplanets•4d ago•46 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
242•dmpetrov•16h ago•128 comments

Cross-Region MSK Replication: K2K vs. MirrorMaker2

https://medium.com/lensesio/cross-region-msk-replication-a-comprehensive-performance-comparison-o...
4•andmarios•4d ago•1 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
344•vecti•18h ago•153 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
508•todsacerdoti•1d ago•248 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
393•ostacke•22h ago•100 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
307•eljojo•19h ago•190 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
361•aktau•22h ago•187 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
435•lstoll•22h ago•284 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
26•bikenaga•3d ago•13 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
72•kmm•5d ago•10 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
28•1vuio0pswjnm7•2h ago•26 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
98•quibono•4d ago•22 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
275•i5heu•19h ago•224 comments

Watermark API – $0.01/image, 10x cheaper than Cloudinary

https://api-production-caa8.up.railway.app/docs
3•lembergs•2h ago•3 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1085•cdrnsf•1d ago•466 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
310•surprisetalk•3d ago•45 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
36•romes•4d ago•3 comments
Open in hackernews

A fast 3D collision detection algorithm

https://cairno.substack.com/p/improvements-to-the-separating-axis
269•OlympicMarmoto•7mo ago
I discovered this collision detection algorithm during COVID and finally got around to writing about it.

github repo: https://github.com/cairnc/sat_blog

Comments

double051•7mo ago
Hey that's Ascension from Halo 2. Cool test case!
chickenzzzzu•7mo ago
Real OGs know :) I used to love all of the super bounces and out of bounds tricks, though I think Ascension didn't really have many of the latter
reactordev•7mo ago
This is novel indeed! What about non-spherical shapes? Do we assume a spherical bounds and just eat the cost? Either way, narrow phase gets extremely unwieldy when down to the triangle level. Easy for simple shapes but if you throw 1M vertices at it vs 1M vertices you’re going to have a bad time.

Any optimization to cut down on ray tests or clip is going to be a win.

bruce343434•7mo ago
Most likely this can be preceded by testing branches of some spatial hierarchy datastructure, 1 million squared is a lot to compute no matter the algorithm
reactordev•7mo ago
Without optimizations of the vertices buffer, correct, it’s a 1T loop. But we can work on faces and normals so that reduces it by a factor of 3. We can octree it further as well spatially but…

There’s a really clever trick Unreal does with their decimation algorithm to produce collision shapes if you need to. I believe it requires a bake step (pre-compute offline).

I’d be fine with a bake step for this.

OlympicMarmoto•7mo ago
Do you mean non-convex shapes? You can do a convex decomposition and then test all pairs. Usually games accelerate this with a BVH.
andrewmcwatters•7mo ago
Usually you have a render model and a physical model which is a degenerate version of the viewed object, with some objects tailored for picking up, or allowing objects to pass through a curved handle, etc.

I would assume using this algorithm wouldn't necessarily change that creation pipeline.

reactordev•7mo ago
I’m trying to find a way to NOT have hull models included in my games. Saving players potentially GBs of disk space.

Constructing Bvh’s on the fly from the high fidelity models we use. Without incurring a performance penalty like we are. So we can improve collision detection instead of clipping due to low res hull models.

The OP’s source code builds a Bvh but it still does so in a way that we’re able to clog it with 34M vertices. Sadly, we’re still going to have to explode geometry and rebuild a hierarchy in order to iterate over collisions fast. I do like the approach OP took but we both suffer from the same issues.

bob1029•7mo ago
> Do we assume a spherical bounds and just eat the cost?

We pick the bounding volume that is most suitable to the use case. The cost of non-spherical bounding volumes is often not that severe when compared to purely spherical ones.

https://docs.bepuphysics.com/PerformanceTips.html#shape-opti...

Edit: I just noticed the doc references this issue:

https://github.com/bepu/bepuphysics2/issues/63

Seems related to the article.

reactordev•7mo ago
Yeah triangle-triangle is really dependent on number of triangles.

I noticed that issue is 6 years old, what’s the current state?

msteffen•7mo ago
I'm trying to work through the math here, and I don't understand why these two propositions are equivalent:

1) min_{x,y} |x-y|^2

   x ∈ A

   y ∈ B
2) = min_{x,y} d

   d ≥ |x-y|^2

   x ∈ A

   y ∈ B
What is 'd'? If d is much greater than |x-y|^2 at the actual (x, y) with minimal distance, and equal to |x-y|^2 at some other (x', y'), couldn't (2) yield a different, wrong solution? Is it implied that 'd' is a measure or something, such that it's somehow constrained or bounded to prevent this?
mathgradthrow•7mo ago
I can't read substack on my phone, so I can't see the article, but the correct statement that is closest to what you have written is just that d is any real number satisfying this inequality. We define a subset U of AxBxR by

U={(a,b,x):x>|a-b|^2}

and then were looking for the infimum of (the image of) U under the third coordinate function

d(a,b,x)=x

Jaxan•7mo ago
But why would d be much greater. The problem asks to minimise d, and so it cannot be greater than the smallest |x-y|^2.
OlympicMarmoto•7mo ago
This is the epigraph form of the problem. You try to find the point with the lowest height in the epigraph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigraph_(mathematics)

msteffen•7mo ago
Ah, got it, thanks!!
markisus•7mo ago
I think you are missing that d, x, and y are variables that get optimized over. Any choice of d lower than the the solution to 1) is infeasible. Any d higher than the solution to 1) is suboptimal.

edit: I see now that the problem 2) is missing d in the subscript of optimization variables. I think this is a typo.

leoqa•7mo ago
Aside: I learned the Sep Axis Theorem in school and often use it for interviews when asked about interesting algorithms. It's simple enough that you can explain it to non-technical folks. "If I have a flashlight and two objects, I can tell you if they're intersected by shining the light on it". Then you can explain the dot product of the faces, early-exit behavior and MTV.
Animats•7mo ago
Nice. It's definitely an optimization problem. But you have to look at numerical error.

I had to do a lot of work on GJK convex hull distance back in the late 1990s. It's a optimization problem with special cases.

Closest points are vertex vs vertex, vertex vs edge, vertex vs face, edge vs edge, edge vs face, and face vs face. The last three can have non-unique solutions. Finding the closest vertices is easy but not sufficient. When you use this in a physics engine, objects settle into contact, usually into the non-unique solution space. Consider a cube on a cube. Or a small cube sitting on a big cube. That will settle into face vs face, with no unique closest points.

A second problem is what to do about flat polygon surfaces. If you tesselate, a rectangular face becomes two coplanar triangles. This can make GJK loop. If you don't tesselate, no polygon in floating point is truly flat. This can make GJK loop. Polyhedra with a minimum break angle between faces, something most convex hullers can generate, are needed.

Running unit tests of random complex polyhedra will not often hit the hard cases. A physics engine will. The late Prof. Steven Cameron at Oxford figured out solutions to this in the 1990s.[1] I'd discovered that his approach would occasionally loop. A safe termination condition on this is tough. He eventually came up with one. I had a brute force approach that detected a loop.

There's been some recent work on approximate convex decomposition, where some overlap is allowed between the convex hulls whose union represents the original solid. True convex decomposition tends to generate annoying geometry around smaller concave features, like doors and windows. Approximate convex decomposition produces cleaner geometry.[2] But you have to start with clean watertight geometry (a "simplex") or this algorithm runs into trouble.

[1] https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/stephen.cameron/distances/

[2] https://github.com/SarahWeiii/CoACD

OlympicMarmoto•7mo ago
> But you have to look at numerical error.

Yeah I agree, the error analysis could be many blogs in and of itself. I kinda got tired by the end of this blog. I would like to write a post about this in the future. For global solvers and iterative.

> Finding the closest vertices is easy but not sufficient.

As I'm sure you are aware, most GJK implementations find the closest features and then a one shot contact manifold can be generated by clipping the features against each other. When GJK finds a simplex of the CSO, each vertex of the simplex keeps track of the corresponding points from A and B.

> A second problem is what to do about flat polygon surfaces

Modern physics engines and the demo I uploaded do face clipping which handle this. For GJK you normally ensure the points in your hull are linearly independent.

CamperBob2•7mo ago
There's been some recent work on approximate convex decomposition, where some overlap is allowed between the convex hulls whose union represents the original solid.

I wonder if it would be smart to restate the problem in just those terms -- managing bounding-volume overlap rather than interpenetration at the geometric level.

If everything is surrounded by bounding spheres, then obviously collision detection in the majority of cases is trivial. When two bounding spheres do intersect, they will do so at a particular distance and at a unique angle. There would then be a single relevant quantity -- the acceptable overlap depth -- that would depend on the angle between the BV centers, the orientation of the two enclosed objects, and nothing else. Seems like something that would be amenable to offline precomputing... almost like various lighting hacks.

Ultimately I guess you have to deal with concavity, though, and then the problem gets a lot nastier.

oasisaimlessly•7mo ago
Most physics engines do indeed do this and call it something like "collision margin"[1].

[1]: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/113774/why-do-ph...

Animats•7mo ago
The main precomputation needed is the result from the previous frame. Algorithms of this type of convex hull distance are really cheap, because you don't need to examine every vertex, just trace a path to the closest points. That's roughly O(sqrt(n)). If you're doing this over and over as objects move, and start from the previous result, it approaches O(1).
contingencies•7mo ago
I am consistently amazed at your depth of knowledge. Can we have a meal? My shout. I'm crossing the US a lot for fundraising right now, probably nearby someplace. Email in profile.
MortyWaves•7mo ago
I’m getting sick of the number of links submitted to HN blasting me with cookie spam bullshit.
MortyWaves•7mo ago
-4 points suggests many HN users seem to enjoy being spammed by popups
EGreg•7mo ago
Nice to see this! I was writing about this topic 25 years ago: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/Theory_Practice-Issue_01_C...

And part two: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/Theory_Practice-Issue_02_C...

socalgal2•7mo ago
Related? This was posted a few days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44334403

OlympicMarmoto•7mo ago
No AVBD is a solver, they use standard collision detection routines.
ttw44•7mo ago
This stuff is always so interesting to me because this is the part/step of solo game-development where people don't make too much content about it online, so you need to find books/scraps of content about rolling your own complex physics engine. It's all knowledge that's stuck in the industry/random github repos it seems.
RobRivera•7mo ago
Im reading 'Primer on 3D Math for Graphics Programmers"

I highly recommend it to you.